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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

Why consider a 1MB window manager, when you are running Firefox (or Chrome)? The browser is easily the most memory-consuming app on most PCs.

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Up until December 2009, my main computer was a desktop we'd bought in 2000. At some point, we had upgraded it from 128MB of RAM to 384MB.

That last year or so, things got rough. I was really pushing the limit of what it could run without feeling unreasonably sluggish (with pretty normal workloads of browsing, IM, and either word processing or Ruby coding). First, I switched from Firefox to Opera. Then, I switched from Gnome to Xfce to IceWM. This made a world of difference, and I really didn't miss Gnome. It got me another 6 months+ out of that computer without being terribly frustrated all the time.

In most cases, on a modern computer where you have multiple gigabytes of RAM, I agree with you. But it's still nice to have those tiny window managers around.

Depending on how you value your time, a $300 computer will run circles around a 10-year-old computer, and will be far cheaper than the time spent trying to shoehorn modern applications onto old hardware.

There's something quite satisfying about breathing new life into an old piece of hardware, or extending its life further as in this case.

So although I agree with your point it's nice to not have everything boil down to dollars and cents all the time :)

This is why I prefaced with 'how you value your time'. I completely agree with you. If you're just after something that works, then just buy a new computer. If you like the project of injecting longevity, then the tradeoff is that you're getting entertainment out of your hours.

I'm very much a 'not dollars and cents' guy, but I see a lot of people struggle to maintain old computers when they're not really into enjoying that maintenance activity; those for whom an hour of troubleshooting -foo- is pure frustration with no fun mixed in.

So what? Are you saying that one should run a memory hungry window manager just because you are going to run a memory hungry app inside of it?

To me, the main take-away from the article is that there's more to life than KDE/GNOME, especially given the number of comments showing that the alternatives do have real users. If we apply that logic to browsers, we find that there's more to life than Firefox/Chromium. For example, I'm writing this from w3m running in XMonad at the moment :)

To a Very crude first approximation, you could expect KDE to be 201 times slower than ratpoison, or rephrased you could have 201 times less user latency using ratpoison than KDE. Or ratpoison gets out of the way of the user "two hundred times faster" than KDE so for the average user it would be about that much more productive, with a correction factor for whatever proportion of time users play with WMs/desktops vs doing actual work in an app.

Also there's a fair number of machines out there, used for non-web browsing purposes, yet might still have a use for a GUI.

Lets say you want a virtual cloud host, connected to via VNC to ... linode. The smallest linode is a gig, so you'll be using 1/5 of your total resources just for the window manager if you use KDE. Is that relevant, well only you can decide.

Finally the most interesting part of the graph was the exponential-ish nature of it. For some weird reason I was guessing WMs/Desktops grow vaguely linearily over time so a random sample from random aged WMs would be vaguely linear when graphed... that's not whats happening. Have not come up with an adequate mental model to explain the shape of the curve yet, assuming the data gathering wasn't manipulated to specifically generate it. Maybe its an attractor effect where one pole pulls to 0 or as close as you can get, and the other pole pulls to infinity, or as close as you can get (kde) and everything smoothly distributes in the middle ground.

"To a Very crude first approximation, you could expect KDE to be 201 times slower than ratpoison,"

Uselessly crude. What matters is how much code is on the critical path and how long it takes to run, not how much is loaded into RAM. A JPEG library loaded into memory that is not used when switching between windows doesn't impact window switching time. Contrariwise, KDE may have many thousands of times the latency if it tries to do many DBUS calls or something for an action that a simpler window manage would simply perform in-process. And it may not matter because "many thousands" of times the latency may still end up below the human perceptual threshold anyhow; 5ns vs 5ms is a whole lotta difference, except it sort of isn't when it comes to humans, both are instant.

I use ratpoison, the 1MB window manager. I'd still use it if it took up a 1GB or whatever because it still is my favorite wm. The low memory footprint is a nice perk, specially when it's running alongside memory hogs like firefox.

So there's more room for Firefox or Chrome.

Which is definitely something worth measuring, as a browser pull in lots of shared libraries, which often cause some of the gap between bare window managers and desktops to decrease, especially if the WM isn't using a UI toolkit in the first place.

Also, given the memory need of modern webapps, I wonder if even the delta between the two extremes amoutns to more than one or two opened tabs. Of course, if one or two tabs is all that your machine can handle, this is significant.

because it _is_ better, without all unneeded bells and whistles. besides, a browser is not the only app you run, right? If not go and buy yourself a tablet, and don't use PC, as you don't need them.

Because you can.

Why does every choice need a 'business case?'

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